The New Middle Ages

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Bonnie Wheeler
English & Medieval Studies
Southern Methodist University
Dallas, Texas, USA
The New Middle Ages is a series dedicated to pluridisciplinary studies of
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 Tolkien, Self and
Other: “This Queer
Creature”
Jane Chance
Jane Chance
Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished
Professor Emerita of English
Rice University
jchance@rice.edu

The New Middle Ages

ISBN 978-1-137-39895-6    ISBN 978-1-137-39896-3 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-39896-3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016950220

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

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For Joe, Rachel, and Arianna
 “I do not think that I am frightfully important … I am … the most
modest (or at any rate retiring) of men, whose instinct is to cloak such
self-knowledge as he has, and such criticisms of life as he knows it, under
mythical and legendary dress.”—J.R.R. Tolkien, letter to W.H. Auden,
7 June 1955
 Contents

Preface and Acknowledgmentsxi

Abbreviationsxxi

Chronology of Composition and Publication Dates

and Significant Eventsxxiii

1 Introduction: “This Queer Creature”   1

2 Forlorn and Abject: Tolkien and His Earliest Writing

(1914–1924)  19

3 Bilbo as Sigurd in the Fairy-Story Hobbit (1920–1927)  47

4 Tolkien’s Fairy-Story Beowulfs (1926–1940s)  83

5 “Queer Endings” After Beowulf: The Fall of Arthur

(1931–1934) 111

6 Apartheid in Tolkien: Chaucer and The Lord of the Rings,

Books 1–3 (1925–1943) 133

ix
x Contents

7 “Usually Slighted”: Gudrún, Other Medieval Women,

and The Lord of the Rings, Book 3 (1925–1943) 177

8 The Failure of Masculinity: The Homecoming

of Beorhtnoth (1920), Sir Gawain (1925),
and The Lord of the Rings, Books 3–6 (1943–1948) 215

9 Conclusion: The Ennoblement of the Humble:

The History of Middle-earth 241

Works Cited249

Index 267
 Preface and Acknowledgments

J.R.R. Tolkien, who was awarded highly coveted name professorships in

Anglo-Saxon and Middle English at Oxford during his own lifetime, was
much more forward-thinking than has previously been considered. Key
are his humanism and his feminism—his sympathy for and toleration of
those who are different, unimportant, or marginalized—the alien, the
rustic, the commoner, the poor, the female, and the other. Conversely,
Tolkien throughout his work and his letters expressed strong repugnance
for the fascist, the despot, the master, and the king who exploit, abuse, or
kill those who serve them.
I argue in this study that such empathy derived from a variety of causes:
the loss of his parents during his early life, a lifelong shyness that made him
uncomfortable among others (although he reveals in one letter that he can
don the guise of affability as needed), the loss of close friends in World
War I, and a consciousness of the injustice and violence in that war and
World War II. As a result of his obligation to research and publishing in
his field, propelled by his sense of abjection and diminution of self, Tolkien
concealed aspects of the personal in his medieval adaptations, lectures,
essays, and translations in relatively consistent ways. Tolkien’s “queer”
medieval begins with the study of Old and Middle English, Finnish, and
Old Norse: his own early and scholarly interest in Beowulf, the Kalevala,
the Völsunga Saga, Arthurian romance, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Sir

The original version of this book was revised. The version supplied here includes
final author corrections.

xi
xii Preface and Acknowledgments

Gawain and the Green Knight, and many other works. Among his most
significant lectures and essays on the medieval are “Beowulf: The Monsters
and the Critics,” “On Fairy-Stories,” “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,”
and “A Secret Vice,” along with his editions, translations, notes for, and
adaptations of signal works (including, among others, the Ancrene Riwle,
The Battle of Maldon, Beowulf, his Sellic Spell, the Legend of Sigurd and
Gudrún, “The Story of Kullervo,” The Fall of Arthur, and the poems of
the Gawain-Poet).
These scholarly writings blend with and relate to his fictional writings in
various ways depending on the moment at which he began teaching, trans-
lating, or editing a specific medieval work and, simultaneously, composing
some poem, fantasy, or fairy-story. Especially significant in this analysis and
comparison of works is the dating of each Tolkien work, by which I mean
the date when he began reading, thinking about, and writing it, and when
he last worked on it—not necessarily the date these works were published.
This study progresses from a comparison of those scholarly works with his
earliest fictional works and poems—some taken from Unfinished Tales and
the Book of Lost Tales, along with The Hobbit, portions of The Lord of the
Rings, and The Silmarillion. What Tolkien read and studied from the time
before and during his college days at Exeter and continued researching
until he died—primarily between 1910 and 1948—once detected, opens
a door into understanding how he uniquely interpreted and repurposed
the medieval in constructing fantasy.
In the introduction, titled “This Queer Creature” in reference to a “lit-
tle man” Tolkien describes in an encounter in “A Secret Vice,” I explore
his use of this persona or doppelganger in terms of the concepts of alterity
and the queer identified by theorists Lee Edelman, Alexander Doty, and
medievalist Tison Pugh to identify what might be termed his aesthetic of
a “queer medievalism.”
Linked with this theoretical beginning is the second chapter, which is an
exploration of the reasons for Tolkien’s own sense of himself as different
from others, queer—“Forlorn and Abject: Tolkien and His Earliest Writings
(1914–1924).” Here, South African-born Tolkien emerges as a modest and
unassuming author who never considered what he created as monumental.
Orphaned at twelve, relatively slight in build, he made his way in his youth
by means of mental acuity and male friendships, at King Edward’s School
and then at Exeter. A husband, father, and professor, all while fairly young,
first, at Leeds, and then at Oxford, he found models for his characters in
his fairy-stories and mythology in the medieval antihero. For these heroes
 Preface and Acknowledgments  xiii

he drew on Kullervo, Sigurd, Beowulf, the clerks in Chaucer’s fabliaux,

Sir Gawain, and others that he discovered as a student at King Edward’s
School in Birmingham and at Exeter College, some of whom he lectured
on in his courses at Leeds and Oxford. In this chapter, Julia Kristeva’s
theory of the abject helps to unify Tolkien’s early life, his poetry, and the
issue of self-identity in the seemingly wide range of his different kinds
of writing. Such embedding prompted his recreation of those medieval
abject heroes—slightly queered as his own self-projections—in his own
scholarly translations and commentaries on, and adaptations of, the works
from which they originated.
In chapter 3, “Bilbo as Sigurd in the Fairy-Story Hobbit (1920–1927),”
Tolkien composes The Hobbit as a fairy-story, in the light of his regard
for Andrew Lang’s paradigmatic Victorian fairy-story of the northern
hero Sigurd. Fairies (=Elves) and the magic associated with them in this
redacted fairy-story are based on the Völsunga Saga, which Tolkien recre-
ated in his own Legend of Sigurd. Guided at least implicitly by his over-
arching and developing legendarium, he reshapes the Old Norse story
of Sigurd in his own eucatastrophic Hobbit via his own definitions of the
fairy-story: comic antihero Bilbo queers the tragic Sigurd while he engi-
neers a cosmic and peaceful solution to the problem posed by the dragon
Smaug and the enmity between Men and Dwarves.
In chapter 4, “Tolkien’s Fairy-Story Beowulfs (1926 to 1940s),” just as
Tolkien rewrote the harsh “Story of Sigurd” as a fairy-story in The Hobbit,
here Tolkien’s adaptations of Beowulf are explicitly marked by his desire
to rewrite Beowulf as eucatastrophic, happily. While Sellic Spell and the
lays differ in nature and style from his Beowulf course translation of 1926,
they all share one feature: the omission of Beowulf’s failure in the battle
with the Dragon and his ultimate death as a result of his desire to prove
finally heroic—in line with the necessity for a Tolkienian fairy-story. The
chapter also compares his course notes and commentary on Beowulf, to
emphasize his own repurposing of the original Anglo-Saxon in translations
that similarly reflect the personal Tolkien, in line with his transformations
of the epic in his fairy-story Beowulf adaptations. The latter, written in the
early forties, after Tolkien had published both his famous Beowulf article,
“Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” (1937), and The Hobbit (1937),
was also written after his Andrew Lang Lecture in 1939.
Chapter 5, “‘Queer Endings’ After Beowulf: The Fall of Arthur (1931–
1934),” emphasizes Tolkien’s consciousness of the similar endings of
both Beowulf and his own adaptation, The Fall of Arthur: the death of the
xiv Preface and Acknowledgments

hero and leader of his nation and his failure to secure his and its posterity
by means of a legitimate heir and successor to the throne. What all three
of Tolkien’s original medieval poems (including the Legend of Sigurd) and
his own translations or interpretations of them involve is the fall or death
of a hero or king, in each case, one who has no legitimate heir to take his
place and, as king of his nation, no guarantee of a future for his people.
Tolkien’s obsession with death mirrors Lee Edelman’s understanding of
the queer concept of “no future.” That is, the Old English epic Beowulf
would certainly have been in Tolkien’s thoughts as he worked on The
Fall of Arthur because of his teaching responsibilities at Leeds, and then
at Oxford in 1925, which demanded that he lecture on it. Certainly his
completed Beowulf translation existed beginning in 1926; he also wrote
the unfinished poem The Fall of Arthur in Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse,
although his models would likely have been Middle English Arthurian
romances or Victorian and modern adaptations. That Tolkien was also
thinking about The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion mythology
behind his creative works reminds us that none of Tolkien’s greatest
flawed heroes in the fictional works—for example, Bilbo, Frodo, or Túrin
Turambar—have sons or progeny to continue what a leader in Middle-
earth has begun in aiding his own people, whether useful or harmful. For
a great king to die without an heir, in particular, a son to continue to lead
his nation, in medieval terms, poses a disaster for any nation, whether
medieval or modern.
In chapter 6, “Apartheid in Tolkien: Chaucer and The Lord of the Rings,
Books 1–3 (1925 to 1943),” Tolkien’s repugnance toward apartheid
(apartness) as defined in his retirement lecture suggests he deeply resented
throughout his career being treated as set apart from others because he
was a Roman Catholic South African-born medievalist and philologist—a
“friendly foreigner”—whose family came from the rustic West Midlands in
England. Tolkien’s philological studies of Northwestern Middle English
dialects relate personally to his own home there, given their origination
in the Old English dialect of Wessex. Additionally, his birthplace and
home in the west of England while growing up relate to the theme of the
Israelites’ exile in northern Africa dramatized in the Old English Exodus,
which he edited and translated, and to his work on philology in Chaucer’s
commoners’ fabliaux of the rustic Reeve and the Miller. These scholarly
studies were written simultaneously with the first books of The Lord of the
Rings. The medieval works introduce prototypes for the queer or “unnat-
ural” in his anti-epic—namely, the Hobbits, Frodo’s conception of Farmer
 Preface and Acknowledgments  xv

Maggot, and dark Strider, along with many others who appear increas-
ingly strange, the farther away from the “norm” of the rustic Shire in
which they happen to live. Intolerance for difference—alterity—threatens
community and leads, as Tolkien reveals, to war and devastation.
Chapter 7, “‘Usually Slighted’: Gudrún, Other Medieval Women, and
The Lord of the Rings, Book 3 (1925–1943),” argues against the frequently
articulated opinion that Tolkien was a misogynist. As a “queer creature”
Tolkien was drawn to medieval women similarly abject in his earliest schol-
arship—specifically other rather than Other in the postmodern essential-
ized definition of not male. They occupied singular positions in medieval
saints’ lives and manuals for anchoresses, the latter walled up to separate
them from worldly affairs, chief among them the lives of St. Katherine and
St. Juliana and the Ancrene Riwle (the Anchoress’s Rule). In Old Norse and
Anglo-Saxon literature, he preferred and adapted the tale of the Völsunga
Saga’s Gúdrun, and, in relation to Beowulf, adaptation and commentary
on Grendel’s Mother and Freawaru. Similarly, in The Lord of the Rings, he
creates a few powerful lone female characters—the missing Entwives and
the courageous leader Éowyn, the latter so like Arwen in the appendices
and her ancestor Lúthien in The Silmarillion. These characters begin (like
the masculine antiheroes in the trilogy) from an abject and ignoble posi-
tion in their cultures to finish victoriously, without dependency on men.
In chapter 8, “The Failure of Masculinity: The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth
(1920), Sir Gawain (1925), and The Lord of the Rings, Books 3–6 (1943–
1948),” I argue that two-­thirds of The Lord of the Rings, written during
World War II and several years thereafter, explores a world dominated by
violence in which an arrogant masculinity has failed, leaving it stripped of the
female. The failure of might and of masculine heroism logically connects with
the similar failure of leadership acknowledged in Tolkien’s famous Beowulf
article; with his alliterative verse-drama, “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth
Beorhthelm’s Son,” which contains an essay on “Ofermod,” or pride, as the
chivalric flaw that undercuts leadership by or loyalty to the lord; and with the
fourteenth-­century Middle English alliterative romance Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight, in which Gawain queers his own chivalric oaths and vows—
the feudal and chivalric practice between men—as homosocial. Tolkien not
only coedited this last important work, but translated and lectured on it. Just
as the later books of The Lord of the Rings mimic these homosocial bonds by
means of the Hobbits’ own relationships with other Hobbits and Men they
serve, chivalry is mocked and upended by the sadistic Orcs whom Frodo and
Bilbo literally mimic temporarily, for survival by means of disguise.
xvi Preface and Acknowledgments

The conclusion, “The Ennoblement of the Humble: The History of

Middle-earth,” sums up Tolkien’s concept of the true hero as the most
self-­effacing of individuals—not only the Hobbit Frodo but Halfelven
Arwen and her ancestor Lúthien and the men who love them both.
Toward them and the Fourth Age, of Man, the Third Age has been mov-
ing all along.

***

Tolkien scholars and readers all owe Christopher Tolkien a great debt
for his assiduous labors in identifying, collecting, laying out, and editing his
father’s early and unfinished works so that we could see how this man who
never stopped revising always wrote with many, many unfinished works in
his mind, one overlapping with the other and intersecting it without bound-
aries. And to Christina Scull and Wayne Hammond we should all be grateful
for their painstaking research into details relating to his life and writings
as reflected in the Chronology and Reader’s Companion—everything that
might matter in learning whatever and whenever Tolkien read, wrote, pub-
lished, and revised. Of course, all Tolkien scholars owe gratitude to Peter
Jackson as well, for bringing to the entire world greater exposure to the
importance of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings by means of his three films.
My debts to other scholars for helping me engender the ideas that resulted
in this specific study are manifold. I am especially grateful to those readers
of drafts of this book who facilitated what I hope are improvements: Leslie
A. Donovan, John Garth, Thomas Honegger, and Tison Pugh, as well as
the anonymous readers for the Press. In addition, through generous offers
from many others—to speak at their campuses or their conferences or insti-
tutes or publish work in their essay collections—my understanding of post-
modern Tolkien has developed over the past fifteen years, and certainly since
1992, when The Lord of the Rings: The Mythology of Power first appeared in
print and touched on the relevance of Michel Foucault for understanding
Tolkien. These scholars who created opportunities and provided support for
my work or who wrote essays on which I have relied on and been inspired
by include: Canon Betty Adam, Douglas A. Anderson, Dorsey Armstrong,
Melissa Arul, Harold Bloom, Marjorie Burns, the late Jackson J. Campbell,
Julie Couch, Janet Brennan Croft, Deidre Dawson, Leslie A. Donovan,
Graham Drake, Michael Drout, the late Kathleen Dubs, George Economou,
Lee Edelman, Bradford Lee Eden, Deanna Delmar Evans, Dimitra Fimi,
Verlyn Flieger, Judy Ford, Mike Foster, Karl Fugelso, John Garth, Wayne
 Preface and Acknowledgments  xvii

G. Hammond, John R. Holmes, Shaun Hughes, Kathleen Coyne Kelly,

Kristen Larsen, Gergely Nagy, Tison Pugh, John D. Rateliff, Robin Reid,
Edward L. Risden, Deborah Sabo, Christina Scull, Alfred Siewers, Jr., Joseph
B. Trahern, Jr., Christopher Vaccaro, Richard C. West, Ralph Wood, and many
others, namely, those whom I met at conferences, Tolkien at Kalamazoo,
and sessions at Western Michigan University’s annual medieval conference
between 2000 and 2007 (and by means of my editing of the three collections
of essays that grew out of those inspiring sessions). My thanks especially go to
Bonnie Wheeler, editor of the New Middle Ages Series, who published in her
series my earlier coedited collection on Tolkien, Tolkien’s Modern Middle Ages,
and who encouraged the completion of this study, and to former Medieval
Institute director Paul Szarmach, who first allowed medievalists to try some-
thing new under my own queer rubric “Tolkien at Kalamazoo,” borrowed
from “Spenser at Kalamazoo” and “Shakespeare at Kalamazoo.”
I am also indebted to institutions, institutes, and societies who have
hosted my lectures, presentations, and plenary sessions on, or about,
Tolkien in which some aspect of this book originally appeared: Baylor
University, Bucknell University, California State University-­San Marcos,
Christchurch Episcopal Cathedral in Houston, the Dallas Consortium
of Medievalists, the English Institute of the University of Pécs in
Hungary, Houston Baptist University, the International Arthurian
Society, Károli Gáspár Protestant University in Budapest, Marquette
University, the North American Arthurian Society, the NEH Institute
for Teachers on “From Beowulf to Postmodernism: J.R.R. Tolkien’s
Lord of the Rings,” the New York City Jung Institute, Pázmány Péter
Katolikus Egzetem University in Eger, Hungary, the Rice University
Alumni Association, the Rice University Society of Women, St. Hugh’s
College, Oxford, St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Fayetteville, Arkansas,
the Society for the Study of Homosexuality in the Middle Ages, Texas
A&M University at Commerce, the Texas Medieval Association,
Texas Tech University, the Tolkien Society of Oxford, the University
of Bucharest in Romania, the University of New Mexico Institute for
Medieval Studies (and its Outreach Seminar for High School Teachers),
the University of Vermont English Department, and, most especially,
Western Michigan University, not only for my own conference papers
but also for allowing me to create Tolkien at Kalamazoo and foster the
study of Tolkien as medievalist.
Several chapters originated from conference papers, a plenary round-
table, and a session response. “The Mythology of Magic: Tolkien’s Hobbit
xviii Preface and Acknowledgments

and Andrew Lang’s Red Fairy Book” was presented in a session on The
Hobbit organized by Bradford Lee Eden and moderated by Douglas
A. Anderson, Forty-Seventh International Congress on the Middle Ages,
Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI, on Thursday, 10 May
2012. I served as a respondent to a “Queer Tolkien” session organized
by Graham Drake for the Society for the Study of Homosexuality in the
Middle Ages at the Forty-Eighth International Congress on the Middle
Ages, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI, Friday, 10 May
2013. I was also tapped to participate in a plenary roundtable on Tolkien
and King Arthur sponsored by the North American Arthurian Society at
the International Arthurian Society Triennial Conference, University of
Bucharest, Romania, on 25 July 2014; and I delivered “Tolkien’s Victorian
Fairy-Story Beowulf” in a session on “Tolkien and Nineteenth-Century
Medievalism” at the Fiftieth Annual International Congress on Medieval
Studies, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI, Thursday, on 14
May 2015.
Permission to reprint material from articles published previously in vari-
ous collections was granted at the time of acceptance and contract by the
appropriate editor and/or publisher specifically with an eye to later publi-
cation in this future book. However, any previously published material has
been for the most altered, expanded, and revised, or adapted for specific
use in this book. Material and ideas have come from pages in the follow-
ing articles or chapter sections, in order of publication: The Lord of the
Rings: The Mythology of Power (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press,
2001), 26–37; “Tolkien’s Women (and Men): The Film and the Book,”
in Tolkien on Film: Essays on Peter Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings,” ed.
Janet Brennan Croft, 175–193 (Altadena, CA: The Mythopoeic Press,
2004); “Introduction: Tolkien’s Modern Medievalism,” and “Tolkien
and the Other: Race and Gender in Middle-earth,” in Tolkien’s Modern
Middle Ages, ed. Jane Chance and Alfred K. Siewers, 173–188 (New York
and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); ‘Subversive Fantasist: Tolkien
on Class Difference,” in The Lord of the Rings, 1954–2004: Scholarship
in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder, ed. Wayne Hammond and Cristina
Scull, 153–168 (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2006);
“‘In the Company of Orcs’: Peter Jackson’s Queer Tolkien,” in Queer
Movie Medievalisms, ed. Katherine Coyne Kelly and Tison Pugh, Queer
Interventions Series, 79–96 (Farnham, Surrey, UK, and Burlington, VT:
Ashgate Press, 2009); “Tough Love: Teaching the New Medievalisms,”
Defining Medievalism(s) II: Some More Perspectives, ed. Karl Fugelso,
 Preface and Acknowledgments  xix

76–98, Studies in Medievalism 18 (2010): 76–77, 80–82, 83–91; revised

and/or reprinted by permission of Boydell & Brewer Ltd., Cambridge:
D.S. Brewer, 2009; and “Tolkien’s Hybrid Mythology: The Hobbit as
Old Norse ‘Fairy-Story,’” in The Hobbit and Tolkien’s Mythology: Essays on
Revisions and Influences, ed. Bradford Lee Eden, 78–96 (Jefferson, NC:
McFarland, 2014).
The cover image, Giorgio de Chirico’s “The Enigma of a Day” (1914),
Museum of Modern Art, New York, was selected after virtual dialogue
with Tolkienists and medievalists Verlyn Flieger, Karl Fugelso, and
Christopher Vaccaro, and with Ryan Jenkins, my ever-helpful editor at
Palgrave-Macmillan. This work of art belonging to the scuola metafisica
most represents melancholy, a sense of the failure of the past, isolation—an
image contemporary with the beginning of the “Great War,” which so
affected Tolkien as well. Palpable is the silence in the scene at daybreak—a
customary time for new beginnings—wherein a once-important man, as
represented by a statue garbed in outdated clothing, cannot speak, and
his community is missing, lost or hidden. Verlyn Flieger suggests that the
statue powerfully speaks to her of “the poet isolate between the towers.
That’s the man you’re writing about.” She also liked “the stark light and
shadow that defines both the landscape and the figure” along with the
fact that “the face is turned away from the viewer.” I am delighted to have
enjoyed my colleagues’ help in choosing it.
 Abbreviations

Hobbit The Hobbit; or There and Back Again. 3rd edn. London:
Allen & Unwin, 1937, 1966; Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1938, 1967; repr. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. By page
number(s).
Letters The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Ed. Humphrey Carpenter with
the assistance of Christopher Tolkien. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1981. Identified by addressee, date, and letter and
page number(s).
LOTR The Lord of the Rings. 1954–1955, 2nd edn., with Note on the
Text by Douglas A. Anderson. Note on the 50th Anniversary
Edition by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull. London:
HarperCollins; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004.
Citations appear within parentheses by book, chapter, and
page number(s).
Scull Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond. The J.R.R. Tolkien
Companion & Guide: Chronology, vol. 1; Reader’s Guide, vol.
2. London: HarperCollins, 2006.
By individual volume title and page number(s.)
Silm The Silmarillion. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. 2nd edn. London:
HarperCollins, 1999; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001.

xxi
xxii Abbreviations

Because of the difficulty in working with the many differ-

ent versions of The Silmarillion mythology, although I will
point out dates and editions of the various manuscripts and
typescripts, generally I will use the edited text supplied by
Christopher Tolkien in The Silmarillion unless a specific man-
uscript edited in one of the volumes of Unfinished Tales or The
History of Middle-earth offers a specific insight.
 Chronology of Composition
and Publication Dates and
Significant Events

Dates have been taken from J.R.R. Tolkien: Life and Legend. An Exhibition
to Commemorate the Centenary of the Birth of J.R.R. Tolkien (1892–1973)
(Oxford: Bodleian Library, 1992), Scull and Hammond’s Companion:
Chronology and Reader’s Guide, Carpenter’s Biography, and notes by
Christopher Tolkien in various publications and editions.

1892
3 January John Ronald Reuel Tolkien born in
Bloemfontein, Orange Free State, South Africa
1895 His mother, Mabel, and the boys return to
England
1896 His father Arthur Reuel Tolkien (b. 1857) dies
on 15 February of rheumatic fever
1903 Goes with scholarship to King Edward’s School,
Birmingham, where he begins to read Chaucer
in translation and is introduced to Anglo-Saxon
grammar
1904 “What is Home Without a Mother (or a Wife)”
(picture completed in Mabel’s absence at Aunt
Jane Neaves’s house)
Father Francis Morgan of the Birmingham
Oratory becomes Ronald’s guardian after his
mother (b. 1870) dies from diabetes complica-
tions on 14 November
1910 Wins an exhibition at Exeter College, Oxford
xxiv Chronology

1911
3 February Speaks on “Norse Sagas” to the Literary Society,
King Edward’s School
31 March? Composes the poetic “The Battle of the Eastern
Field,” a parody of the Lay of Lake Regillus by
Thomas Babington Macaulay
September Composes a poetic parody of Kirby’s translation
of the Kalevala called The New Lemminkäinen

1914
22 November Speaks to the Corpus Christi’s Sundial Society
about the Kalevala
27 November Reads the poem “The Voyage of Éarendel the
Evening Star” (Éala Éarendel Engla Beorhtast)
to the Exeter Essay Club

1915
27–28 April–3 May Composes the poem “Goblin Feet” at Oxford at
the same time as the poems “You & Me / and
the Cottage of Lost Play” and, several days later,
the eight-line “Tinfang Warble” and “Kôr: In
a City Lost and Dead,” followed by “Morning
Song”
Takes a First in English and applies for a com-
mission with the Lancashire Fusiliers before
World War I
21–28 November Composes the poem “Cor Tirion þÆlfwinera
þǽra béama on middes,” later changed to
“Kortirion among the Trees”

1916
22 March Marries Edith Bratt
28 June Second Lieutenant Tolkien joins the 11th
Battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers at the front
1 July Close college friend Rob Gilson is killed but his
death remains unreported in the news until 17
July
 Chronology  xxv

22 July Tolkien’s King Edward’s School friend

R.S. Payton is killed in battle
25 October Tolkien, the battalion signaling officer, begins
to fall ill from “trench fever” (transmitted by
lice) and three days later enters the officers’
hospital at Gézaincourt, an illness that will last
off and on until he is released from service on 8
July 1919
3 December Tolkien’s close college friend G.B. Smith dies as
a result of battle-wounds

End of 1916–first half of 1917

  Composes The Fall of Gondolin
  Composes the prose The Cottage of Lost Play,
first version of his mythology
16 November Son John is born in Cheltenham
First version of “Beren and Lúthien” composed
in Yorkshire after birth
1918 Back at Oxford teaching at the English School
after recovery
Begins writing the “Lost Tale” of Túrin Turambar
1919 Begins writing “Turambar and the Foallóke,”
Book of Lost Tales, Part 2
At work on the Oxford English Dictionary
1920 Composes “Ælfwine of England” in “The
History of Eriol, or Aelfwine and the End of the
Tales”
10 March Reads a short version of “The Fall of Gondolin”
to the Exeter College Essay Club
Trinity Term Teaches a class on Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight at Oxford
xxvi Chronology

1 October Early interest in the Ancrene Riwle in the

Corpus Christi College Cambridge MS 402
while beginning to teach at University of Leeds
as Reader
Christmas Tolkien writes the first of the Father Christmas
letters to son John in response to his query
about who he is
1920–1927 The Hobbit begins as tales told to his children
1921–Summer 1924 Continues work on The Children of Húrin
16 August C.T. Onions asks Tolkien to work on an edition
of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
October Kenneth Sisam’s Fourteenth Century Verse and
Prose published
1922 George S. Gordon and Tolkien discuss the idea
of editing a student’s anthology of Geoffrey
Chaucer with Oxford University Press
May Publishes his first book, A Middle English
Vocabulary, intended for use with Kenneth
Sisam’s Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose (and
later published together with it)
22 October Second son, Michael, is born
December Publishes a poem indebted to Chaucer about reg-
istration at Leeds, “The Clerke’s Compleinte,”
in the Leeds University magazine The Gryphon
?End of year Composes the poem “Iúmonna Gold Galdre
Bewunden,” from a line in Beowulf

1923
January Publishes that same poem in The Gryphon
26 April Publishes an unsigned review of Furnivall’s
Hali Maidenhed edition in the Times Literary
Supplement
Late December Works on text proofs for the Clarendon Chaucer
 Chronology  xxvii

1924
21 November Son Christopher is born
1925 Elected to Rawlinson and Bosworth
Professorship of Anglo-­Saxon at Oxford
Begins editing and translating of “The Old
English Exodus”
Writes “Sigelwara Land” article (an article about
the Old English Exodus)
Begins Beowulf translation and Sellic Spell
April Publishes “Some Contributions to Middle-­
English Lexicology” in Review of English Studies
  Tolkien and E.V. Gordon publish their edition
of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Mid-June Along with George S. Gordon, finishes reading
proofs for the Clarendon Chaucer
July “The Devil’s Coach-Horses” (about a line in
Chaucer’s Summoner’s Tale) is published in the
Review of English Studies
23 August Begins writing the Lay of Leithian (date marked
at line 557), the story of Beren and Lúthien
1926
Early 1926 Constructs first outline of “The Silmarillion”
(the earliest version, “Sketch of the Mythology
with especial reference to ‘The Children of
Húrin,’” 28 pages) for his old schoolmaster
R.W. Reynolds
Hilary Term Founds the Kolbítar Reading Group to translate
Icelandic sagas
?26 April (?) Completes translation of Beowulf and Pearl
Summer Tolkien may have written the first words of The
Hobbit while marking School Certificate exami-
nation papers
xxviii Chronology

17 November Delivers a paper on the Elder Edda at the Exeter

College Essay Club
1926–1927 The Hobbit actually composed and written down

1927
18 February The Kolbítar Reading Group starts translating
the Völsunga Saga at Exeter College
26 June The Kolbítar Reading Group finish translating
the Prose Edda and the Völsunga Saga
27 November Joins the Arthurian Society, whose president is
Eugène Vinaver
1928 Publishes foreword to Walter E. Haigh, A New
Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District
1929 Article on linguistic aspects of West Midlands
Middle English in “Ancrene Wisse and Hali
Meiðhad” appears in Essays and Studies (possibly
originating June 1925)
18 June Daughter Priscilla is born
1929–1930 Writes a note on the name “Nodens,” the name
of a god at a Roman temple in Lydney Park,
Gloucestershire
Late 1920s Writes “The New Lay of the Völsungs” and
“The New Lay of Gudrún”
1930 Proposes an edition of Ancrene Riwle in series
of manuscripts to Oxford University Press
28 or 29 January Attends a Kolbítar meeting with C.S. Lewis and
others
Early 1930s Two lays, “Beowulf and Grendel” and “Beowulf
and the Monsters, II,” the first, sung to the
seven- or eight-year-old Christopher
Writes much of the long poem The Fall of Arthur
1930s–1940s Edits and lectures on the Old English Exodus

1931 Abandons The Lay of Leithian

 Chronology  xxix

16 May “Chaucer’s Use of Dialects” (later titled

“Chaucer as a Philologist” [The Reeve’s Tale] is
read to the Philological Society

?1931–Trinity Term 1933

  Rhyming draft composed of “The Homecoming
of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son”
1932 Publishes “The Name Nodens” in Appendix I
to Report on the Excavation of the Prehistoric,
Roman, and Post-Roman Sites in Lydney Park,
Gloucestershire
December Publishes “Sigelwara Land,” Part I, in Medium
Aevum
1934 Publishes “Chaucer as a Philologist” (The Reeve’s
Tale) in Transactions of the Philological Society
June Publishes “Sigelwara Land,” Part II, in Medium
Aevum
1935 Agrees to edit the Corpus Christi College
Cambridge “Ancrene Riwle” MS for the Early
English Text Society
1936 Begins work on The Lord of the Rings
Privately prints “Songs for the Philologists” by
Tolkien, E.V. Gordon, and others
25 November Delivers “Beowulf: The Monsters and the
Critics” as the Sir Israel Gollancz Lecture to the
British Academy
1937 Publishes “Beowulf: The Monsters and the
Critics” in Proceedings of the British Academy
21 September Publishes The Hobbit; or There And Back Again

1938
20 February Letter to the Observer about the sources of The
Hobbit having been derived from epic, fairy-
story, and mythology
xxx Chronology

29 July Former student and collaborator E.V. Gordon dies

1939
8 March Delivers the Andrew Lang lecture at St. Andrews
University on “Fairy Stories.”
1940 Publishes Preface to John R. Clark Hall prose
translation of Beowulf and the Finnsburg
Fragment
Early 1940s Completes a comic prose adaptation of the first
two-­thirds of Beowulf, titled Sellic Spell
1944 Sir Orfeo translation no earlier than this date
January 1945 Publishes “Leaf by Niggle” in the Dublin
Review
Completes alliterative verse-drama, “The Home‑
coming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son”
1946 Elected Merton College Professor of English
Language and Literature at Oxford
1947 Supervises B. Litt. thesis of A.J. Bliss, texts of
three manuscripts of Sir Orfeo
With former student Simonne T.R.O. d’Ardenne
publishes “‘Iþþlen’ in Sawles Warde,” in English
Studies
Publishes “On Fairy-Stories” in Essays Presented
to Charles Williams
1948 With former student Simonne T.R.O. d’Ardenne
publishes “M.S. Bodley 34: A Re-collation of a
Collation” in Studia Neophilologica
1949 Publishes Farmer Giles of Ham

1950
6 November News of the Sir Gawain and Green Knight
translation reaches Stanley Unwin
 Chronology  xxxi

1951
8 June Sends to Oxford University Press all the avail-
able working galleys, corrected glossary proofs,
and draft notes for most of the pieces (or at least
his pieces) in the Clarendon Chaucer
“Middle English ‘Losenger’” appears in Essais
de philologie moderne

1953
15 April W.P. Ker Memorial Lecture on Sir Gawain and
the Green Knight at the University of Glasgow
June E.V. Gordon’s posthumous edition of Pearl is
published, having been revised by Ida Gordon
and, in smaller part, by Tolkien
December Provides foreword titled “A Fourteenth-Century
Romance” to his translation of Sir Gawain and
the Green Knight on the BBC Third Programme
“The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s
Son” appears in Essays and Studies

1954
  Receives an Honorary D.Litt. from University
College, Dublin, and University of Liège
  Writes “The Istari” while compiling an unfin-
ished index for The Lord of the Rings; essay pub-
lished later in Unfinished Tales
  Former student A.J. Bliss’s revised edition of Sir
Orfeo published
1954–1955 First volumes of The Lord of the Rings appear in
print
1955 Former student Mary B. Salu publishes the
Ancrene Wisse translation with Tolkien’s preface
dated 29 June 1955
xxxii Chronology

1959
5 June Delivers his “Valedictory Address to the
University of Oxford” during his last term and
retires from Merton Professorship
1962 Publishes Ancrene Wisse Corpus Christi
Cambridge MS 402 edition with Early English
Text Society
Believes Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and
Pearl translations nearly finished
Publishes The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and
Other Verses from the Red Book
Festschrift for Tolkien is published: English and
Medieval Studies Presented to J.R.R. Tolkien on
the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday
1963 “English and Welsh” is published in Angles and
Britons: O’Donnell Lectures
1964 Tree and Leaf published
1965 Writes Smith of Wootton Major in response to a
request for a preface to George MacDonald’s
“The Golden Key,” a work and author he
decided he did not like
1966 The original draft of the translation of the Book
of Jonah, heavily revised by others, appears in
The Jerusalem Bible
October “Tolkien on Tolkien” appears in the Diplomat

1967
November Smith of Wootton Major is published

1973
3 September Tolkien dies
1975 Translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,
Pearl, and Sir Orfeo published posthumously